ConstitutionDAO or whatever

I had plans to try and do a Web3 Week at some point soon, but in the meantime, I dunno, whatever's going on here. I understand that, per Max Read, DAO teens build up hype by obsessively tweeting about how community is the culture of success or whatever, and they all think that they won in defeat, somehow. However, I think the failure of ConstitutionDAO to achieve its objectives and the subsequent fallout is going to be a substantial net negative for crypto people, because it’s likely to either alienate or put off a lot of people. Not just the people who directly lost money due to not understanding how gas fees work, though almost certainly them too, but more likely people in general, hoi polloi the crypto gang claim to want to welcome to the party.

You only get one chance to make a first impression. A lot of people probably bounced off crypto forever when Bitcoin got big because they saw it as internet funny money and have never had a second look. If I were a Serious Crypto Guy this would really wind me up! If you keep having headlines like “Crypto group attempt to buy constitution, fails, contributors don’t get their money back” that makes people way less likely to get into whatever it is you're doing with it that's actually good in future.

Also, while acknowledging that there are far worse things to be than uncool, I'm inclined to agree with Read's assessment in his second piece that "there are a cappella groups cooler than these people". Prizing above all cool, and a certain kind of worldly seen-it-all-ism that I think Gawker (of which Read used to be the editor) exhibited, can often be bad. Cool is very malleable, and you can use it to justify a lot of shitty behaviour and opinions. However, I think it's also equally fair to say that people can be earnest about incredibly bad or foolish things. The cool kids are often wrong, but that doesn't mean that the uncool kids are necessarily right.